Bane of Existence
by Bambu
Summary: Draco Malfoy has been on the run for years, and now finds himself at the mercy of Hermione Granger. She claims she wants to help, but does she really? (Written post-HBP)


Bane of Existence

By Bambu

Spoilers: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Disclaimer: The source work for this IATQO Challenge Response (#38,) does not belong to me. Alas and alack, for the characters and the wizarding world belong to J.K. Rowling, her publishers and studio. I have merely borrowed them for a short time, without a desire to offend or capitalize monetarily upon their use.

~o0o~

"Granger," Draco growled. He was furious that he'd been caught in her trap, and not a little panicked as the scent of something mixing with Dumbledore's Delight tickled his senses. "Let me out!"

Across the cluttered room, she bent over her steaming cauldron, backlit by the rainbow of twilight colors visible through the picture window making up one wall of the cottage's main room. The advent of the rising moon made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle and the dormant beast coiled within his breast stir.

The wizard struggled with his feral reactions even as he appreciated the gilding the sinking sun's rays bestowed upon the young woman. How could it have come to this, he asked himself for the thousandth time. How could it be the only one he could have sought assistance from was the golden girl of the victorious Order of the Phoenix?

The answer was as painful as it was obvious: with Snape dead, there were only three potions makers alive capable of brewing what he needed; and each of the others would have turned him over to the Ministry of Magic as soon as they'd pierced the veil of his anonymity.

After his return to Britain, Draco had hidden in the depths of the Forbidden Forest, adding to the legend of the Shrieking Shack every month. Lupin, in his charity, had shared at least that secret before he'd died.

In the end, however, desperation and belief in Hermione Granger's intrinsic goodness - even in his thoughts the word dripped with venom - had over-ridden his prudence. He'd been mad enough to cling to the belief that she still retained some of her childish idealism. What a gullible wanker he'd been! He'd been so trusting that until the Disillusioned metal door had clanged shut behind him, he hadn't even recognized the trap.

He stood impotently in the midst of a cell, bordered on three sides by stone walls with a fourth wall of iron bars set magically into the floor and roof. Only now did he acknowledge that it wasn't goodness which had led Granger to offer assistance when she'd learned who he really was. It had been an entirely different virtue which had tipped the scales in his favor: eligibility.

He was the ideal test subject.

With another low growl, he crossed to the wall of bars imprisoning him and shoved uselessly at the gate. "I said let me out, bitch! You lied to me!"

"I did not! You came to me for help, and I'm going to do just that ... help you." She didn't pause in her careful motions, her vine-wood wand describing a precise arc of the triquetra she was tracing while magically stirring the noxious, bubbling potion. The cauldron sat atop a stone slab, obviously an oft-used work bench.

How ironic, he thought bitterly, as she sprinkled red rose petals into the gold vessel with her distaff hand ... Gryffindor House colors.

Silence, save for the hissing of the potion, reigned for a time in the spacious room.

With understandable trepidation, he kept track of the deepening colors in the sky, dark amber leaking into mauve and aubergine. The beast unfurled in expectation, and Draco's senses began their monthly descent into feral acuity. Experimentally, he rattled the bars again. They held fast ... for now.

Although, when the moon shone in its full glory it would be a different story and even Granger didn't deserve to pay the price for harboring him. As it was, his conscience bore the suffocating weight of too many depravities. "If you release me I can still get back in time, but I have to leave ... now!"

"You aren't leaving. You need this. You know you do." Granger didn't even glance in his direction.

"You stupid witch! Don't you know what will happen if I stay? This ridiculous cage won't keep me in. Didn't you learn that from your precious Lupin?" He almost spat the name of their former DADA professor.

For one moment, he thought he'd shaken her resolve, but he was wrong. She was as stubborn as she'd ever been, and her attention appeared to be wholly absorbed in her delicate task.

After all, it had been she who had learned to make the Wolfsbane Potion following Snape's disgraced departure from Hogwarts. She had been seventeen at the time, and Snape curled his lip in derision when he had heard of her success. But Snape had never mentioned it again, not even when they learned of her brewing it faithfully, month-after-month, for the final years of the Voldemort War. She had eased and lengthened Lupin's life long after he had wished it to end. Once his young bride, his second chance, had been killed, Lupin's only _raison d'etre_ was to help Potter succeed in his quest. Lupin had done just that.

Granger paused, irritably pushing a tangle of curls from her damp forehead, then she turned to look at her pre-mutation captive. Her brown eyes appraised him coolly, and Draco was suddenly struck by how different she was from the swotty little witch she had been at school.

"Yes, I know exactly what will happen at moonrise, Malfoy, and I know that you will be rendered safe if you drink this potion. Remus found solace here when Greyback allowed him a transformation in peace."

"Salazar's Ghost! Don't tell me you were in love with the werewolf?" He started to chuckle. It was a rich, bitter sound, and it was absorbed by the book-lined walls. "That's perfect! The Mudblood and the Werewolf. It should have made headlines."

Pausing briefly as a delicious thought entered his mind, Draco's derisive mirth twisted, sustaining a note of mockery at the possibilities. "Or did he not return your affections? That's it, isn't it? You were devoted to him, and he didn't even know how you felt, did he?"

Face flushed with anger, her voice rose to a shrill, "You wouldn't understand, you narrow-minded chauvinist! I helped Remus because he was my friend, just as I helped Harry and Ron, and just as I would help anyone who was in real need."

If the situation hadn't been so dire he would have truly laughed. Even after the war and all she had lived through, she was still risible.

Granger turned her back to him, and Draco watched her slender form bypass a comfortable, well-worn seating arrangement in order to reach a narrow table propped between two book cases. He could see the last ingredient waiting for its final processing.

As the waxing power of the moon began to exert its influence, his eyes gleamed in a predatory tarnished-bronze hue. His sight became sharper, clearer, and he saw the small movement of her shoulders as she took a couple of calming breaths. He licked his lips watching the tiny tremors in her hands smooth out while she regained control.

"Damocles Belby, the originator of the Wolfsbane Potion, agreed that I was onto something with my modifications," she lectured while she worked.

There was no denying her skill. Her movements were efficient and graceful, and her deft fingers gathered the mound of tiny, freshly-picked buds, dropping them into a sterling mortar. Draco sucked in his breath as he realized the vessel she was using was pure silver. An icy chill of fear frosted the coil of nauseated anticipation in his belly.

Blithely unaware of the direction of her prisoner's thoughts, Granger smashed the delicate buds with a silver pestle, the mate to its receptacle, until the herb's peculiar pungency filled the room, almost overriding the smell of the brewing Wolfsbane.

Draco's nostrils flared, his sharpened senses cataloguing the various scents, and he opened his mouth a fraction, allowing the receptors on his tongue to taste the aromas hanging in the air. Quickly recognizing the sharp tang of aconite, the overpowering main ingredient of the potion, he dismissed it from scrutiny. Next, he ignored the underlying hints of lemon oil and the astringent fragrances of rosemary softened by lavender, which he accurately surmised were general cleansing concoctions. Then he assessed the unusual and unidentified odor of the ingredient Granger was energetically mashing. Try as he might, the last living Malfoy didn't recognize the strange smell. However, his baser nature was determined to fix on what it considered the most intriguing fragrance of all ... the pungent musk of a woman at her most fertile.

He grunted, his eyes flicking to the darkening sky as he exerted human control over bestial need. There was no hint of desire in Granger's intrinsic scent, but she was undoubtedly ripe, and the wolf had been denied its natural desires for a very long time. Clenching his hands in white-knuckled fists, Draco forced his attention to the unknown ingredient, and the possibilities that might result from adding it to a standard Wolfsbane Potion. Still, his green-gold eyes tracked Granger's every movement, wary of her motives.

She turned to her stone work bench, carrying the mortar, and the look on her face turned his guts to water.

In the low light of the room, her face appeared to hold an expression that was both calculating and distant. It reminded him strongly of the type of look he had seen on the Dark Lord's face when adjudicating an offender's punishment.

It reminded him forcefully of the night the Dark Lord had given him that look, a decade before, when he'd failed to kill Albus Dumbledore. That had been the second time Draco Malfoy had attended a summoning by Lord Voldemort, and it had been the night Remus Lupin had given in to the Dark creature that had ruled his existence since he'd been a boy.

Seemingly unaware of his scrutiny, Granger continued with her monologue of information, and he remembered the numbers of times he'd ignored her in class, but this was different. Now, the stakes were much higher.

"... that first time, the brew was too strong. I shouldn't have used the root. The results were unsatisfactory."

The cool, academic abstraction in her attitude forced his own survival to the forefront of his thoughts, and, suddenly, he wanted out! How short-sighted – how desperate had he been to think she would actually help him? He had never been nice to her or her friends. He'd humiliated her at every opportunity which presented itself, from verbal taunts to increasingly physical demonstrations of his loathing. But he'd been gone from Britain for a number of years, and living in exile with the misery of his affliction had distanced him from his past, and given him an entirely new perspective on bigotry. He had thought that past would remain safely on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean ... until those horrifying moments when Walden Macnair and a small, hand-picked band of mercenaries had breached the wards on the shielded cabin in the Appalachians where he and Snape had lived in seclusion.

Much like Granger lived now. Alone ... isolated.

She continued speaking to him as if he was paying attention, "There is always trial and error in the subtle science and exact art of potion-making. I didn't like the initial results, but then I thought using alternative sources of the herb's genetic material might be effective. This will be the first time I've actually used the buds in the potion."

It was then that Draco remembered where Remus Lupin had died.

"The theory is sound, and I think Snape would have been intrigued by my research."

He watched her carefully tip the mashed buds, resembling nothing so much as a pinkish, flesh-colored paste, into the quietly simmering cauldron. His nostrils flared once more as the heat of the potion reacted with the addition of the final ingredient.

Christ! What a perfect opportunity for revenge.

No one would waste a moment's thought on his death. The Ministry would undoubtedly rejoice as they crossed his name off the Most Wanted list, and the secret of his half-breed status would die with him. Hermione Granger would be hailed a heroine. Again.

He stopped his almost absent-minded rattling of the cage and began, in earnest, to seek a weakness to his prison.

Across the room, Granger stirred the viscous, odiferous liquid. Her murmurs could be heard faintly, "... sleep inducing ... reduces frequency and intensity of seizures ... Ludicrous not to have tried this before. Valerian ... so elementary. Ostracism of werewolves ... so many experimental failures."

He wasn't looking at her or listening to what she was saying. Instead, his sharp eyes had discovered a small window situated high upon the wall. It seemed to be unlatched. He might be able to fit through it, if only he could reach it while Granger was distracted.

"Here ... drink this."

Her voice startled him, it was so near. Draco whipped around to find her standing just beyond the bars, a golden goblet in her hand. The noxious odor assaulted his senses, the steam causing his eyes to water. Even so, interest prickled at the base of his spine as he inhaled her scent along with the smell of the potion. Regardless of the circumstances, his primal instincts were wrestling for control of his body, and soon, the human side of his nature would take the Omega position.

He tried to read her expression, but her once-open face was devoid of clues. He would be damned if he'd be her next failure. "How many werewolves have you killed with this?"

She ignored his question and simply held out the steaming goblet.

"Is this what happened to Lupin? Did you lock him up in a cage until he was a good wolf and drank your poison?"

"You know nothing of what happened. You don't understand. My potion will help you."

He didn't know her well enough to decipher the layers of meaning in her comment, but the beast in his chest almost howled in triumph as it was convinced that he had seen the pink underbelly of its prey. She was, after all, within reach. But the wizard was unconvinced. "Or have you professed your own innocence so many times aloud that you now believe it? He died while in your care!"

"I helped Remus, just as I'm going to help you." Her hand began to shake.

Draco's mouth flooded with excess saliva as her natural fragrance altered, and he tasted her apprehension. His ears caught the almost infinitesimal quaver in her voice, and his heart leapt when he met her huge, brown eyes with his half-feral gaze.

"I don't have to understand, you horrid bitch. You fed him a half-arsed potion and he died! You killed him, and I rejoiced when I heard that he was dead."

"You ... rejoiced?" She backed up a step.

Was it fear ... or revulsion?

"Of course, I rejoiced. Remus bloody Lupin deserved exactly what he got! Who the fuck do you think turned me?"

"No! Not Remus. He wouldn't ... he couldn't have ..." She shook her head sharply in negation, hair flying wildly in curly strands about her head. Her eyes widened in distress, and, for a second, the hand at her side gripped the iron bar between their bodies, steadying herself. Her other hand kept a precarious hold on the top-heavy goblet. "He told me Greyback was responsible for your mutation."

"He lied to you! Lupin bit me!" A growl escaped Draco's mouth unbidden, but in his anger he didn't retreat. At the moment, he didn't care if he was too close to his transformation to be in such proximity to an untainted human. He was too angry, with both dead werewolves ... with Granger. She had always defended Lupin, always waved a flag in the shabby wizard's corner. For years, Draco had mocked the streak of compassion Granger exhibited toward those less fortunate – house-elves, Death Eater spies, fugitives from Azkaban, murderous Hippogriffs, werewolves - but he had planned to capitalize on what he considered a weakness in his present circumstances. Now, as moonrise became imminent, he doubted the soundness of that decision.

"Mutation? He called it a mutation? It's not a sodding mutation! It's a curse! Lupin wasn't a saint, Granger. He might have bitten me on Greyback's orders. But he did it. It was a test of his loyalty because no one trusted him, and it was Voldemort's idea of a fitting punishment for my incompetence."

"No ... I ... I ... he told me it happened at the same meeting they forced the Dark Mark on him…"

"Oh, it happened then, all right. But I was the floor-show, and Lupin more than lived up to their expectations. He enjoyed it." His reminiscence was like acid, eating away at his memories, but he eyed her speculatively. Beyond her, he could see that the sun had set in its final glorious flare of white light; a brief, shining moment signifying the death of the day.

The goblet quivered in her hand, and a droplet spilled from its rim. He heard a faint sizzle from the wooden flooring, and he looked down to watch a thin tendril of smoke rising from the spot where the potion had landed.

His eyes narrowed, then looked at the witch and her offering. His muscles began to ripple, pain raced along his limbs, and he knew that the time for his decision was upon him. However, he had too many questions at this point to blindly accept whatever she was offering.

Noting her obvious distress at his revelation, he pressed his advantage, scenting the kill. "I won't drink that potion ... now. Let me out, Granger. Let me go on my way, and I'll never darken your door again."

"No, you're here to test this. It will work."

Her manner was unsettling, and the hackles of his neck – or where there soon would be hackles – itched and wanted to react. His scalp prickled as if he was cocking his ears to listen with that extra-sensory perception he was granted each full moon.

"The way it worked on Lupin? No, thanks. I don't want to end up dead!" He backed away from her then, all the way across the available space, almost tripping over a footstool.

"Is that what you think? That I'm going to kill you?" She looked furious, and then contemplative, her teeth nibbling on her lower lip. "I suppose I could."

Draco snorted, hoping she was joking, but he remained uneasy enough to doubt if he could trust her ... whether he wanted to trust her. And then the stirring beast within him reacted to the increasing influence of the moon. It wasn't trust he wanted to place in her. He flicked his eyes to the window beyond. The sky was a deep indigo, presaging the coming blackness of full night.

"What happened to Lupin, Granger?"

She stepped up to the bars again. "He killed himself, Malfoy. He waited until Harry was victorious and then he stole my silver athame and cut out his own heart." She choked a little over the last statement.

Watching her struggle to regain her composure was like nectar to his lupine form, and he almost whimpered with the need to taste her discomfort, to soothe her, as if she was a member of his pack. Her scent was sharper now, richer with all the underlying tensions between them: the long-dormant enmity, their volatile dynamic, and the more recent, potentially fallacious good-will. He shook his head, baby-fine strands of white hair flicking in front of his eyes, and ignored his lycanthropic instincts to mate or offer succor.

"He did it here, and I found him. It was the most horrific thing I've ever seen. He had never gotten over Tonks' death. You know that she died protecting him. Greyback ripped her limb-from-limb in front of Remus."

"Bollocks! Trust me, Granger, if Greyback had been the one to kill Lupin's mate that news would have spread within the werewolf community faster than a Snitch in flight."

Her eyelids fluttered as she reviewed the painful memory. "He never talked about it because I ... I Obliviated him."

"What!? The Goddess of Gryffindor? You didn't turn that filth in to the Aurors?"

"I arrived too late. I didn't want Remus to be the guinea pig, so we were going to test the dosage of my experimental potion on Greyback. We lured him into a trap."

He could smell her sincerity, it mingled with ripe womanhood and distress to taste like the finest of Bordeaux, layered, complex ... delicious. A whine began in the back of his mind, his Alpha dominance rising, and he clearly understood that she had intended for Greyback to be the victim of her experiment. The results had been disastrous.

Guilt. She felt guilty.

It was an emotion and a burden that he was all too familiar with. Her guilt had driven her into isolation. Living alone in her out of the way cottage, filled with Sneakoscopes and other foe-detectors.

"Greyback was cleverer than to fall into such a trap."

"Yes, he was. I was hiding with the potion, having Apparated into the clearing beyond the house. I had an Extendable Ear in place, but I didn't need it to hear what was happening inside. Remus was grievously injured in the fight and ..." she trailed off in memory.

"And what, Granger?" He prodded impatiently.

Looking beyond the shadowed woman, he watched the glowing harvest moon beginning to rise, casting an amber halo around itself. If he had been anything other than a cursed creature, he would have thought it beautiful. Instead, the moon's increasing fullness heralded a visceral terror and elation that he struggled to contain. It almost wouldn't matter if he took the potion now, the change would happen regardless.

Her voice was pain-soaked from the memory, "I immobilized Greyback and Obliviated him. Remus refused to let me do the same for him, and he stayed my hand from killing Greyback. We couldn't afford to reveal our plans then - it was so close to the end. Harry and Ron had found the next to last Horcrux, and we had just dismantled it. I arrived home with such happy news ... only to be greeted by Tonks' screaming ..." She shuddered, once, and another drop of Wolfsbane sizzled upon impact with the hard wood floor. Neither paid it any attention. "But, oh, how I wanted to kill Greyback that night. For what he'd done to Tonks and Remus and Bill, and all the other lives he destroyed. I hated him then. I still hate him."

He eyed her shrewdly. "You're the one who poisoned him though, aren't you?"

She stood very still at the edge of the bars separating them. All he would have to do to touch her was to reach out his hand. His inner-wolf was urging him to grab her, to control her, to mark her. It seemed that his Alpha wolf quite liked the predatory female it had encountered. When they had stepped so close to one another other Draco had no idea, but he inhaled her subtle, heady scent, holding the breath in his chest and savoring her flavor.

She swallowed hard. "Yes."

"I watched him die, Granger. It wasn't a pretty sight. The Dark Lord put a bounty on whoever killed him." That was the last time Draco had answered a summons by the Dark Lord. He and Snape had fled the following day, having taken months to create effective disguises for their emigration.

She actually laughed at his comment, but it held no amusement. It was dry and dusty, as if she was centuries old rather than in her late twenties. "As if the bounty on my head could have been any higher ... Voldemort was a fool. Vicious and rabid, but a fool nonetheless. And Greyback didn't have to die. A bezoar would have saved him in five minutes. Where was Snape? He would have known."

"He did know. He chose not to interfere with providence, I think he called it."

"I cried when Remus told me that the bastard was dead. The boys couldn't understand why I was crying over some bloodthirsty animal. I couldn't explain it to them… I was crying over the loss of my last piece of innocence."

"Innocence? I don't think I've ever been innocent. My father cured me of that inconvenience before I left for school." Draco hadn't meant to talk about anything so personal, but half his attention was focused on restraining his need to paw at the floor and mark his territory on the walls and furniture ... or her.

"I'd imagine so. At least you had Snape with you for all those years. My own parents were killed just after our sixth year at school."

"I didn't remember that."

Her eyes flicked behind him, and he realized that she was taking note of the unlatched window. She wasn't going to let him go, and part of him, the increasingly desperate wizard, thought perhaps it didn't really matter if he survived for another month.

Granger spoke softly. "Some things are difficult to forget ... like being hated, being feared ... learning how to kill."

Absently, he noticed that she'd slid her wand from the quick-release sheath along her thigh. When she'd put it there he hadn't noticed, probably when he was examining his cell. Her comment had struck a chord, though. "I remember learning that last lesson," he said. "It was the most difficult, and it wasn't Lucius who taught it to me. It was Severus."

"I'd forgotten that Snape was like a father to you."

"More than my own ever was." It had been an excruciating realization that while his father had given him life, Snape had taught him to be a man.

"That was the last time I cried ... when I got the news about Macnair killing Snape." Granger's eyes were huge and wet, and filled with something he thought might be real compassion in their depths.

"Why would you cry for Severus? I thought you lot hated him because he killed Dumbledore."

She tsk'd at him. "Please. Give me some credit. Dumbledore was already dying from disabling Slytherin's ring. Didn't you ever notice that the gangrene on his withered hand was spreading ... was immune to treatment?"

"No!"

"Snape never told you? You sound just as Confunded as the boys. They didn't believe me, either. Not until Poppy Pomfrey confirmed it."

His growl this time was more beast than man, and reflexively, Granger took a step back from the bars, the golden goblet retreating with her.

"Don't call me a boy!" he snarled. With a sickening realization, Draco knew that he'd delayed for too long. The incipient change was creeping along his veins, flushing through his muscles, waiting for the propitious moment to pounce.

If he strained, Draco was certain that he would be able to hear her elevated heart beat, even as he eyed her throat, watching the fluttering of her jugular vein under smooth skin. His inner wolf salivated at her nearness.

Ignoring his comment, and with a quick flick of her wand and a non-verbal spell, Granger cast a diagnostic net. Instantly, a shower of scintillating sparkles hovered over his body, those at his extremities glowing green, but darkened significantly toward the trunk of his body. Hundreds of motes of light circling his head and heart were turning orange.

He couldn't read her reaction, but noticed that her eyes narrowed. After a few seconds' thought, she huffed. "Quit with the delaying tactics. We don't have much time. You must drink this within the next two minutes."

He leaned toward her, deliberately inhaling her scent, greedily noting her nervous anticipation. The darkening hairs on his arms rose and his primitive interest burned in his groin. "Tell me the truth, Granger. What will it do to me?"

"I have been telling you the truth. It will help you!" She looked directly into his eyes and held his gaze. Her pupils were dilated to such an extent their darkness subsumed the muddy color of her irises until it appeared as if her eyes were opaque onyx.

"Help me? How? Will you take a wand oath that you aren't seeking revenge? That this isn't poisoned like whatever it was you gave Greyback?"

Granger lowered her eyes and re-sheathed her wand. Then she steadied the golden goblet with both hands, holding it out to him ... an offering to soothe the savage beast. But the liquid's surface rippled as a result of her trembling hands. "Malfoy, I swear to you that the enhanced Wolfsbane in this goblet is not what I gave to Fenrir Greyback. Will that do? There's not enough time for a wand oath."

The moon was rising. Its round, gold face three-quarters full cast light into the room, leaving a bas-relief of shadow playing across one white-washed wall. It drowned out the faint, flickering flame of the oil-lamp illuminating her work space.

She swallowed hard, and her voice shook just a little when she spoke again. "Just drink the damned thing."

He crossed his arms, the sinews rippling as they prepared for his transmutation. He ignored his body and the clamoring of the beast as it clawed and scratched its way into existence, and assessed her. Her lower lip was bloodless from the grip of her perfectly proportioned front teeth, and he remembered that he was responsible for them. Her hair was frizzled from the heat of the cauldron, and her eyes met his without wavering. It had been a decade since he'd seen her, and three months since he'd asked for her aid, but it had been four hours since he'd walked into a trap, and a lifetime since he'd been willing to accept anything from a Mudblood. "Why?"

"Just trust me." She glanced over her shoulder at the almost completely round orb perfectly framed by the large plate glass window.

When she turned to face him Draco's breath caught in his throat. It seemed as if her entire heart was readable in her eyes. The only trouble was that he had never learned to read the language.

"Please." She spoke so softly it was almost a whisper.

He measured what he knew about her against his own desire for freedom and survival. "Again, why?"

Their eyes met and held.

"It's a leap of faith ... Draco."

He took a deep breath and stared into her eyes.

He reached for the goblet.

~o0o~

Author's Note: As always my thanks to SnarkyWench for her completely on-point comments and lightening fast response time.

For those who will ask about a continuation, I wanted to give you an answer here. I have decided to let this stand as a one-shot. I wanted to create a scenario similar to Frank R. Stockton's _The Lady or the Tiger_, in which the ending is left to the reader's imagination. I only hope that I've managed it with some degree of success, and you're able to find enough clues to support either answer ... the wolf or the witch.

12/2006


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